TorrentFreak

Last month we reported that Geremi Adam, producer of some of the highest quality pirate movie copies ever seen on the Internet, had been caught and had been ordered to appear in court in January. Adam, aka ‘maVen’ had other ideas - and has disappeared.

When the Oscars roll round every year, the movie industry goes to great lengths to stop nominated movies leaking to the Internet. Every year they fail, miserably. Here is a comprehensive list of piracy stats for all Oscars movies since 2003, from camcorder copies right up to DVD Screeners.

Just days after Sylvester Stallone had an armed guard deliver an advance screener copy of the new “Rambo” movie to Howard Stern, it’s shown that even these type of security measures can be rendered useless. A copy of the movie is now available on BitTorrent, likely leaked by an industry insider.

Pirates are innovators, they signal market problems and lead the way to new business models. Nevertheless, they are tagged as thieves by many. We invited Matt Mason, author of the book “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism”, to write an article on the “pirate’s dilemma” for TorrentFreak.

SuperTorrents recently fell victim to an attack by alleged ‘Scene’ members who revealed the site owner’s identity. Further action was promised against torrent sites and today another tracker admin’s life has been turned upside down. The attacker’s message: “Destroying The P2P’s, One Step at a Time”

Last week we reported on the release of Steal This Film 2, a documentary about the past, present and future of filesharing. The film is free to download, but people are encouraged to donate some money if they want to support future projects. Surprisingly, the pirates who decided to donate were quite generous.

The US Pirate Party has no candidate for the upcoming elections, but who do the pirates vote for? Barack Obama, and the party strongly urges all its members to support his campaign, and vote for him in the primaries, and later this year in November.

The SuperTorrents BitTorrent tracker has been the subject of a major security breach, with hackers gaining access to private accounts from which they donated all the site’s money to a religious group. The hackers even went as far as contacting the site’s host and canceled all of their seedboxes.

27th January 2008 will see only the second election worldwide to include a Pirate Party on the ballot. It will not, however, be in Sweden, but the German state of Hesse, in south-west Germany.

Ever since Demonoid decided to pull the plug following pressure from the CRIA, thousands of members are wondering what happened. Perhaps even more importantly, they are asking themselves this: Is Demonoid ever going to come back?

Anyone into downloading pirate movies from the internet over the last few years likely knows that the label ‘maVen’ on a video release was usually a mark of a high quality ‘cammed’ movie. After dozens of major releases and investigations by the FBI and Canadian police, ‘maVen’ now faces 6 months in jail.